I was hired to sit with a man the doctors said had five days left. One night I laid my teething baby on his chest — and his fingers moved. Then he whispered: don’t tell anyone I’m awake.

We are not what people assume. He is not a father to me and he is not anything else to me either, and there has been a certain amount of nudging from one or two people and it is wide of the mark.

What we are is two people who spent one night in a room getting a system down to four seconds.

He paid for something once, in the first year, without asking me, and I gave it back, and it was the only serious argument we have had.

He said: I can afford it.

And I said: that is exactly the problem, and it took him about a fortnight to understand what I meant and he has not done it since.

And Theodric does not know any of this. He knows an older man who walks slowly, and who always gets down onto the floor with him — which takes that man the better part of a minute, and which he does anyway, every week.

Here is the only thing I have.

Everybody wants this to be about a baby who woke a man up.

It is not. It is about a woman who noticed something in week two and did nothing about it until week six, and who is celebrated for the six weeks and not asked about the four.